Watch for Me by Moonlight Read Online Free Page B

to bite his nose, pulling himself up on their beds every morning. When Merry and Mally came down for school, Owen would be lying on the kitchen floor, using his feet to stack up the gigantic cardboard blocks he got for Christmas and then kicking them over. And he had his appetite back. He ate Cheerios and cooked peas with both fists and literally drank down as much of Grandma Gwenny’s home-jarred applesauce as he could from his plastic cup.
    The crisis was over, and the girls barely had a week to go shopping for the Valentines’ Day dance. The Val Dee was a formal at school that, for some reason, everyone treated as a bigger deal than Homecoming. The twins felt free to enjoy it now. For a few days after the hospital emergency, Owen had been a little quiet and sad, Campbell said, sleeping in Sasha’s arms in the morning instead of running around. The girls usually left early to catch a ride in with Drew, who played pickup basketball before school now that the cross-country season was over, so they rarely crossed paths with Sasha. But now, Owen was all two-toothed grins.
    In fact, Campbell thought it was possible that he had simply over-reacted to new teeth.
    This Sunday morning, Mallory had even taken off work at their dad’s store so she could buy a dress. She worked every Sunday and had since she was twelve. Meredith could only imagine how much her sister, who was a renowned tightwad, had stashed away. The girls were geared up to head for the mall in Deptford when their mother stopped them and told them to sit down for breakfast first.
    Meredith sighed. Her friends and fellow cheerleaders Neely, Kim, and Erika were going to meet them in front of Latte Java in an hour. Now, there would have to be a mass of texting and squiggling schedules.
    “I wanted to tell you girls that I have to add just one more sitter,” Campbell told them as they took their coats off and set them on the chair by the front door. “If I take another course next semester, I can probably compress this whole thing to eighteen months.”
    “Mom!” Mallory objected. “Five sitters?”
    “Grandma Gwenny is, well, elderly, Mallory. And she happens to have a life of her own. Sasha has two jobs and school. So does Mrs. Quinn, Carla. She’s trying to get her RN degree.”
    “Why don’t you hire just one person, then?” Mally asked. “Do you think this is good for Owen? He never knows who’s coming over next!”
    “I tried to hire one person. The going rate for one person was twenty dollars an hour!” Campbell said.
    “It would be better,” Mallory said, thinking of the vision of the slender hand wiping Owen’s mouth that still gave her the willies for no good reason.
    “Would you rather have him in a daycare center?” Campbell said, her hands on her hips.
    “At least there wouldn’t be twenty-seven people taking care of him at a daycare center,” Mallory said. She sat down at the table and laid her head on her arms, trying to let her “sight” come forward. But it wouldn’t come. What was bothering her? Why did she have such a big thing on about this? Owen was fine!
    “And it’s fine that they’re germ pits, right? At least the one in Kitticoe is. They let the babies sit in playpens all day! It’s my personal feeling that children can’t have too many loving people in their lives,” Campbell said. “Or in their homes. Now, if you want to give up indoor soccer on Saturdays and working with Dad at the store on Sundays, I won’t need Melissa Hardesty. She’s a college student, and her mom is a doctor at the clinic. So I know her. It’s not like I’m inviting everyone off the street to take care of my baby.”
    “You didn’t know Sasha!” Meredith objected. “You hired her after, like, a ten-minute interview.”
    “I did a background check on her. She’d never even had a speeding ticket!”
    “Sasha’s nice though,” Meredith interrupted. “What about Luna?”
    Campbell turned back to the pancakes she was about to